Infographic: The Online Ad Industry Is Like the Stock Market

ADOTAS – If you want a one-page summary of how the online ad industry has changed in the past few years, take a look at this new infographic from Pretarget: Advertisers used to place ads on specific websites, targeting that site’s visitors. Now advertisers can target audiences much broader than any one site, placing ads all over the web using behavioral data to target users wherever they might be. And today’s methods, according to the infographic, mirror the way the stock market works: In each, there’s a buyer, a seller, an adviser, a facilitator, the trading technology and a marketplace. This doesn’t capture every aspect of the industry, but frankly, this is an industry with a lot of aspects, and this graphic wraps up a lot of what this space looks like at the moment in one eyeful. See it below (click to enlarge):

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Adotas Senior Editor Brian LaRue has been working in journalism in some form or another for slightly longer than his entire adult life, having won his first SPJ (Society of Professional Journalists) Award while he was still in high school. Prior to joining Adotas, he served as a reporter, editor, columnist, critic and blogger, mostly for a number of daily and weekly newspapers scattered around his native Connecticut. In his off hours, Brian maintains an active parallel life as a musician and music blogger.